The present invention generally relates to a computer program product for verifying a road network of a map, and more specifically to continuously improving the road network of a map.
In various fields such as connected vehicle, intelligent transportation or location-based service (LBS), a map provides fundamental information to support other services. In particular, a road network of a map may be used to provide information regarding roads and traffic lines. Currently, the quality of free maps is rather poor. Traditionally, users have to pay for high-quality road network data (purchased in data lump, or purchased by use time), which restricts common users use of a road network.
It has been proposed to generate a road network using location data collected by the positioning systems of vehicles or mobile devices. Meanwhile, some non-commercial third-party map providers also provide road network services. However, a common problem for these road networks lies in low accuracy. Due to restrictions in various aspects such as device, cost, policy, data collection, road network generation for a free map may have limited accuracy. Therefore, the road network data of many currently available maps may be problematic. Two most common road network errors are road segment missing error and road segment connectivity error. A road segment missing error means a route in the real world is not correctly reflected on the map, while a road segment connectivity error means connectivity between road segments on the map has a deviation from the actual roads. The road network in the map may also have other types of errors.
Inaccurate road network may cause inconvenience to a user. For example, if one or more road segments indicated in the road network do not exist, the user would have to reselect a route during traveling, which not only wastes the user's time, but also might cause a traffic problem, or a security risk. On the contrary, if a road segment existing in the real world is not reflected in the road network, it likely wastes the user's time and resources, and the user has to modify their route.